Google Home Mini Caught Recording Audio Due to Hardware Issue

Ouch. With the Google Home Mini being released on October 18th, it was discovered that some of them were constantly recording audio and transmitting it back to Google without being intentionally activated.

With security and privacy at the forefront of everyone's minds these days, especially with products that are capable of recording your conversation, this is obviously not the type of bug that Google wants right before a product launch.

So what happened?

Those who attended the recent Google launch event were given a free Google Home Mini to take home with them. According to Artem Russakovskii from AndroidPolice, who attended this event, it appears that his device had been silently sitting there and transmitting what it recorded back to Google for about a week before he noticed.

You can see in the video created by Artem how the Google Home Mini would activate on its own as indicated by the four lights turning on.

When he contacted Google about the issue, they immediately sent someone over to pick up the device in order to a detailed analysis. According to the emails received by Artem, Google stated that this appeared to be a hardware bug in some of the Google Home Minis.

We have learned of an issue impacting a small number of Google Home Minis that could cause the touch mechanism to behave incorrectly. We are rolling out a software update today that should address the issue. If you're having any additional issues, please feel free to contact Google Support at 1-855-971-9121.

While the Home Mini is typically activated by a user saying "OK, Google" or "Hey, Google", you can also activate the Mini press performing a long press on the device's panel. It appears that there was a bug in some of the Minis that caused it to think that long presses were being conducted and thus triggering the recording of sound.

According to Google, a new firmware with version unmber 1.28.100122 has already been rolled out to all Google Minis that disables this long press feature in order to prevent it from triggering unwanted recordings.

Lawrence Abrams is the creator and owner of BleepingComputer.com. Lawrence's area of expertise includes malware removal and computer forensics. Lawrence Abrams is a co-author of the Winternals Defragmentation, Recovery, and Administration Field Guide and the technical editor for Rootkits for Dummies.

Comments

Fair guess that most that read BC articles keep privacy/security concerns in mind, when assessing new technologies. We're less likely to invite devices into our homes (or offices), unless and until those concerns are addressed - no matter how enticing the features and functionality.

However, there is another community whose members will be hard pressed to reject or delay adoption of these "smart" devices: the disabled. I can only imagine how enabling it must feel to accomplish tasks which take trivial effort for others (or once was for them), but are time consuming, difficult or even impossible for them.

If we can offer more objective assessments of the risks vs. benefits of these technologies - and hold vendors responsible to minimize the risks, and provide informed consent for those that remain - we owe at least that much to those more easily (and understandably so), swayed; if for no other reason than that many of them became disabled helping us.